Saxxy Awards: Voting Now Open, Productivity Now Over
Saxxier every year
Each year, the Saxxy Awards rally the Source Filmmaker community together to make funny, dramatic, wonderfully-animated short films. The best time to watch those videos is when the winners have been announced and the list of submissions has been whittled down to the very best. The second best time to watch those videos is right now, when all the submissions are in, viewable, and you can be one of the people to decide which are the very best.
If you visit Steam's Saxxy page it'll automatically spit out twelve videos for you to watch and, hopefully, rate. You can generate a new queue however if none of the initial thumbnails take your fancy. And you can keep watching them until your work day is done and you're able to safely go home.
This year, Valve tried to encourage machinima makers to use game assets other than Team Fortress 2 for their shorts, making available assets for Portal 2 and encouraging creators of other games to release their own model sets for the software. Still it seems that the lion's share feature Team Fortress 2's expressive cast, for obvious reasons.
Voting ends at 1:59pm PDT on September 29th. As ever, go here to watch my favourite machinima trailer and read an interview with its creator. Or wait here and watch the video below, which is an entrant in this year's competition: